Aros Window Air Conditioner Can Be Controlled by Your Smartphone

General Electric and Quirky—the New York start-up that develops consumer products online by crowdsourcing inventors—have teamed up to launch a window air-conditioner that you can control via a smartphone.

Aros, as the window AC unit will be called, has smart, Internet-accessible controls similar to the Nest thermostat. Its main interface is the Wink app, which can be used to control a family of smart-home products co-developed by Quirky and GE.

If Aros works as advertised, the best part may be its price. A similarly powered GE window AC unit for small rooms (8,000 BTUs, capable of cooling 350 sq. ft) sells for $220. At $300, Aros is priced higher, but it’s designed to do far more.

A feature called “smart schedule” monitors your AC usage patterns and automatically builds a schedule for you, recommending when the unit should be on or off. “Smart away” enables Aros to turn itself off when you leave home, then cool down a room before you get back home. The “smart budget” feature will predict future electricity costs based on factors such as your schedule, your previous usage and forecasts of upcoming weather.

Ben Kaufman, Quirky’s CEO, said that Aros is an indication of where his company’s GE partnership is headed. Their previous collaborations have been novelties—a pivoting power strip, an Internet-connected alarm clock and a smart egg tray. (Yes, it monitors the freshness of a dozen eggs.) Each can be managed with Wink, available on both Apple 's iOS and Google 's Android operating systems.

“Aros is the first product that we have done together that I think leverages what both companies, respectively, do best,” Kaufman said. “The first products we made were us getting our feet wet, learning from one another. But the ultimate vision is to do more like this—big, profound items and true household staples.”

While the Aros window AC can be controlled with the Wink app, it will also work with smart home platforms such as SmartThings.

Quirky

Kevin Nolan, GE’s vice president of appliances, said that Aros pushes his company into new territory. “What Ben and Quirky have been able to do is bring eyes to product categories that look stale and old,” Nolan said, a nod to the fact that this new AC unit looks more like a Bluetooth boombox than a conventional home appliance. (No, you can’t stream music to it.)

Nolan says the collaboration allowed GE to speed up development, too. For window air conditioners, he said, “it takes us at least a year to go from developing a product to getting it onto shelves.” The turnaround for Aros—from a “Smart Window AC“ design submission by inventor Garthen Leslie in November to a running prototype in February—was far faster.

Early adopters can pre-order Aros on Amazon starting today, and will see product in late April or early May. Nolan said that, eventually, Aros would be sold just about everywhere that GE appliances are: Best Buy, Home Depot, Target, PC Richards and other retailers.